Microsoft forced me to switch to Linux • Hacker News Board

Re: Microsoft forced me to switch to Linux

#841

Post by bsimpson » Wed, Jan 28, 2026, 11:25 PM UTC

cogman10 wrote: post #296

DrBazza wrote: post #277

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been using Fedora+KDE for over a decade, Windows 8 was last version of Windows I had installed at home, and we all know what a squarified mess that was. Gnome is fine, but it's just not for me. For everyone on here that complains about Windows requiring an 'online' account, MacOS does as well, but the perception is different. MacOS, just kind of quietly does it, with no ceremony, but Windows does a Ballmer-esque…

Plasma 6 is really polished and simple. I think anyone familiar with windows would be able to grab and run with it immediately. No hate for anyone that likes other desktop environments, I as a long time windows user just really appreciate how familiar KDE feels.

To be fair, it has a thousand different settings and you have to manually click Apply to see them in action.

It's flexible and popular, but I don't know that I'd call it simple. It still feels 90s in a lot of ways.

Re: Microsoft forced me to switch to Linux

#842

Post by mbreese » Wed, Jan 28, 2026, 11:26 PM UTC

Aurornis wrote: post #633

ryukoposting wrote: post #259

I just started a new job where I'm subjected to Windows 11. They gave me a behemoth of a laptop. 64GB of RAM, absolute screamer of a CPU, big GPU, the whole deal. Windows 11's file browser lags when opening directories with more than 100-ish files. Windows 11's file browser takes a few seconds to open at all. Context menus take a noticeable amount of time to appear. I'm getting used to a new keyboard, so I keep hitti…

> Windows 11's file browser lags when opening directories with more than 100-ish files. Windows 11's file browser takes a few seconds to open at all. > Context menus take a noticeable amount of time to appear. I can almost guarantee this is from some endpoint management software your company installed. I have a Windows 11 workstation that I use all the time for some CAD software and the occasional game. Everything is…

> I can almost guarantee this is from some endpoint management software your company installed.

I know you're getting hammered on this, but this is also an indicting statement. If your brand-new OS requires you to have endpoint management that locks it down so much that it affects how long it takes to open files, that's on the OS, not the endpoint management.

Okay, it's on both... endpoint management as a rule is horribly written software, which is shocking knowing how intrusive it is into the system. But, if the OS has so many vulnerabilities that you're required to have endpoint management, that's not a good look on the OS.

My current and former $JOB both required endpoint management on Macs (and a limited amount for folks who used Linux), so it's not a blanket statement. But the impact of the endpoint software on Mac and Linux were still much lower. That is, once I figured out that a certain (redundant) enterprise firewall was crashing my work Mac anytime I plugged in a USB network adapter.

Re: Microsoft forced me to switch to Linux

#843

Post by Zambyte » Wed, Jan 28, 2026, 11:28 PM UTC

greener_grass wrote: post #392

Zambyte wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> if you don't sell your games on Steam or in a way I can run them on Linux I am not buying or playing them. So much this. People like to moan about "oh game XYZ doesn't run so it's not reasonable for gaming". More games run on GNU / Linux than any gaming console. There are simply too many games that do run to give a second thought about the ones that don't, and it's been that way for years.

Does a game "run on Linux" when it has 100% feature parity? 90%? 80%? What are you willing to cut? Some performance? A few graphical effects? Multiplayer? When you look at the details, Linux gaming is not as good as it might seem. But I'm still gaming on Linux!

I can't remember the last time a game did anything other than run (this is with only trying games that have been documented to work). I think the worst I've had is audio not working in cut scenes in some game, but I don't remember what game it was.

Re: Microsoft forced me to switch to Linux

#844

Post by nialv7 » Wed, Jan 28, 2026, 11:31 PM UTC

ryukoposting wrote: post #259

I just started a new job where I'm subjected to Windows 11. They gave me a behemoth of a laptop. 64GB of RAM, absolute screamer of a CPU, big GPU, the whole deal. Windows 11's file browser lags when opening directories with more than 100-ish files. Windows 11's file browser takes a few seconds to open at all. Context menus take a noticeable amount of time to appear. I'm getting used to a new keyboard, so I keep hitti…

iirc the cause of context menu delay was there is an invisible animation I think.

The system is animating the menu opening, except there's no animation. So it just waits for a while doing nothing then the menu pops open.

Re: Microsoft forced me to switch to Linux

#845

Post by bsimpson » Wed, Jan 28, 2026, 11:34 PM UTC

marginalia_nu wrote: post #33

As a long-time Linux user who fairly recently dropped the Windows partition entirely, I do think the remaining chafing points are these: * UI framework balkanization has always been, and remains a hideous mess. And now you don't just have different versions of GTK vs QT to keep track off, but also X vs Wayland, and their various compatibility layers. * Support for non-standard DPI monitors sucks, mostly because of th…

I'm a lifelong Mac user, but a gaming handheld has gotten me into some of these topics. I dual-boot SteamOS and Windows.

On SteamOS, my 5.1 stereo just works.

On Windows, apparently there was some software package called DTS Live (and/or Dolby Live) needed to wrap the audio stream in a container that the stereo understands. There was a time when there was a patent pool on the AC-3 codec (or something like that - I'm handwaving because I don't know all the details). So Microsoft stopped licensing the patent, and now you just can't use AC-3 on Windows. I spent an evening installing something called Virtual CABLE and trying to use it to juryrig my own Dolby Live encoder with ffmpeg… Never got it to work.

It's easy to fall deep into the tinkerhole on Linux, which has kept me away for a long time, but as mainstream platforms get more locked down, or stop supporting things they decide should be obsolete, it's nice to have a refuge where you're still in control, and things still work.

(Insert meme about the Windows API in Proton being a more stable target than actual Windows.)

Re: Microsoft forced me to switch to Linux

#846

Post by pmontra » Wed, Jan 28, 2026, 11:34 PM UTC

sundvor wrote: post #807

Aurornis wrote: post #633

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Windows 11's file browser lags when opening directories with more than 100-ish files. Windows 11's file browser takes a few seconds to open at all. > Context menus take a noticeable amount of time to appear. I can almost guarantee this is from some endpoint management software your company installed. I have a Windows 11 workstation that I use all the time for some CAD software and the occasional game. Everything is…

The endpoint stuff kills laptop performance. I left my previous job and they let me keep my X1 Nano (1st gen; 16GB memory) which was performing abysmally towards the end. Deleted all the partitions and did a 100% clean install (multi boot Win11/Fedora), and it's suddenly what feels like 2-4x as fast. Made sure to disable some of the Copilot and Internet content in search menu rubbish etc with a few registry tweaks (y…

Back in the times of Windows 95 and Windows XP, reinstalling the OS at least once per year made Windows noticeably faster. Then it degraded month by month. And yet I still remember how incredibly faster the same laptop was with Ubuntu 8.04. Faster than a newly installed Windows.

Re: Microsoft forced me to switch to Linux

#847

Post by bsimpson » Wed, Jan 28, 2026, 11:37 PM UTC

amelius wrote: post #52

marginalia_nu wrote: post #33

As a long-time Linux user who fairly recently dropped the Windows partition entirely, I do think the remaining chafing points are these: * UI framework balkanization has always been, and remains a hideous mess. And now you don't just have different versions of GTK vs QT to keep track off, but also X vs Wayland, and their various compatibility layers. * Support for non-standard DPI monitors sucks, mostly because of th…

> UI framework balkanization has always been, and remains a hideous mess. At least things look more or less the same over time. With commercial offerings one day you open your laptop and suddenly everything looks different and all the functions are in a different submenu because some designer thought it was cool or some manager needed a raise. > It'll probably work fine out of the box, but if it doesn't. Hoo boy. LLM…

Pair-programming Nix with Gemini has taught me a lot about the assistive power of LLMs.

They're still slow and annoying at languages I'm good at. But it's really handy to be able to take one I'm not (like Nix or even C++) and say "write me a patch that does …" Applying a lot of the same thinking/structuring skills, but not tripping on the syntax.

Re: Microsoft forced me to switch to Linux

#848

Post by rekabis » Wed, Jan 28, 2026, 11:43 PM UTC

I take an adversarial approach to Windows. Which started with Windows XP and its supremely annoying zip-files-as-folders approach. Sorry, but I didn’t want that, and I still gleefully rip it out of every Windows install I touch.

And then things started snowballing with every version.

Plus, I have elderly clients that got hopelessly lost on any UI after XP, so I had a lot of hacking-and-slashing to do there for not only them, but also myself. Like, just give me the option of a traditional XP-style start menu, goddammit. Thank goodness for StartIsBack.

But what took me about 6-8hrs of directed work with XP is now about 24-48hrs of work with Windows 11. Honestly, I am at the point where I just want to create a highly opinionated one-click configuration app that does everything for me.

And I would, if I still did as many installs as I was doing even half a decade ago.

Hmmm… as a DotNet developer… anyone interested in a spyware-eviscerating, copilot-extracting, settings-preserving app that allows you to retain a mostly-XP style look, and which remains resident to alert you of Microslop changing settings back?

Re: Microsoft forced me to switch to Linux

#849

Post by nomel » Wed, Jan 28, 2026, 11:43 PM UTC

delta_p_delta_x wrote: post #216

jsheard wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Wayland has fractional scaling as a sort-of workaround if you can tolerate the entire screen being blurry. Every other major OS can deal with this. I think Windows is the only other one which really does this properly, macOS also does the hack where they simulate fractional scales by rendering with an integer scale at a non-native resolution then scaling it down.

> I think Windows is the only other one which really does this properly Windows is the only one that does this properly. Windows handles high pixel density on a per-application , per-display basis. This is the most fine-grained. It's pretty easy to opt in on reasonably modern frameworks, too; just add in the necessary key in the resource manifest; done. [1] Linux + Xorg has a global pixel density scale factor. KDE/Qt…

> The last time Windows had such brute-force rendering was in Windows XP, 25 years ago.

To be fair, UXGA was a thing 20 years ago. I don't think it makes sense for Apple to care all that much about low DPI monitors. They don't sell any, and they wouldn't be acceptable to most Apple people, who have had crisp displays available for > 10 years now. I wouldn't be surprised if the number of Apple users on low dpi is single digit percentage.

Re: Microsoft forced me to switch to Linux

#850

Post by gerdesj » Wed, Jan 28, 2026, 11:45 PM UTC

Aurornis wrote: post #633

ryukoposting wrote: post #259

I just started a new job where I'm subjected to Windows 11. They gave me a behemoth of a laptop. 64GB of RAM, absolute screamer of a CPU, big GPU, the whole deal. Windows 11's file browser lags when opening directories with more than 100-ish files. Windows 11's file browser takes a few seconds to open at all. Context menus take a noticeable amount of time to appear. I'm getting used to a new keyboard, so I keep hitti…

> Windows 11's file browser lags when opening directories with more than 100-ish files. Windows 11's file browser takes a few seconds to open at all. > Context menus take a noticeable amount of time to appear. I can almost guarantee this is from some endpoint management software your company installed. I have a Windows 11 workstation that I use all the time for some CAD software and the occasional game. Everything is…

"I have a Windows 11 workstation ... There's no lag with context menus or browsing directories with a lot of files."

You have the same Windows updates as everyone else and it will be painful. Also you should be keeping those CAD and games up to date and that will be very painful. Updates often happen at unfortunate times.

The Win 11 start menu has managed to be worse than the Win 10 effort and jumped to the middle of the task bar because ... reasons. Search on it is ever so slow. For some reason Win server 2025 has decided that I want to use a welsh keyboard (I'm english and tend to en_GB) when I RDP to one. Cymraeg (soz if I got "welsh" wrong) is alphabetically first in the en_GB list of keyboard mappings and I didn't even know there is a welsh keyboard! I suppose they must have some accents and diacritics not found in english. Its all just a bit weird that a bug like that surfaces after well over two decades of me using RDP from a Linux box to a Windows server.

You wag your finger at endpoint management in the same way that most software vendors used to do at AV back in the 90s and 00s (and 10s and 20s!) Its nothing new and basically bollocks! Modern AV is very good at being mostly asynchronous these days and besides, we have unimaginably faster machines these days and very fast CPU, gobs of RAM and SSDs. Copy a multi GB file and yes AV will take a while but at least you might be saved from nasties.

There is a good reason that corp devices have to run things like inventory agents, log shippers and the rest too - its about security. You doing your own IT security is fine and I'm sure you'll be fine.

You can get Win 11 to work on an old machine for now but as you say, you have to circumvent things. When you do that, I think you are storing up issues for later. Perhaps you will be lucky but perhaps not. My dad will soon be rocking Linux instead of blowing a grand+ on a new PC. He will get a secure booting Ubuntu based effort that looks quite similar to Win 11 that is fully supported by the vendor ... and me. I managed to "port" my wife some years ago and she is a much tougher proposition than my dad!